It’s been just over a month since news broke that Intuit (INTU), makers of Quicken budgeting software and Turbo Tax, would buy Mint.com for $170 million.

Some of Mint’s 1.5 million customers took to blogs and Twitter to complain about the deal and threaten to close their accounts.

About 1,500 to 2,000 customers did jump ship, said Aaron Patzer, Mint’s CEO, most within two days of the acquisition announcement. The site also, however, added 45,000 members the same week, for a total of 1.7 million users today. (The site typically adds some 30,000 users a week.) The relaunched Mint iPhone application has been downloaded 350,000 times in the last month.

“In general, there’s been more positive than negative,” he said.

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Suddenly, it’s mating season in the tech sector. Xerox (XRX) is paying $6.4 billion for a piece of the cloud, Adobe (ADBE) is hooking up with Omniture (OMTR) and Intuit (INTU) with Mint, and that may just be the start. As Om pointed out, this is good news for startups and entrepreneurs, especially those with money tied up in late-stage investments that aren’t likely to go public soon.

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Intuit (INTU) CEO Brad Smith has a pretty stark view on the prospects for a near-term turn in the economy: he doesn’t think a recovery is likely the before the end of the company’s July 2010 fiscal year. Nonetheless, the company posted better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter ended July 2009–and he expects better results in 2010. Smith notes that the company posted 4 percent growth in FY 2009, and expects 4-8 percent growth in 2010.

“We don’t see the storm clouds going way,” he said in an interview with Tech Trader Daily. “We’re simply learning to dance in the rain.”

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One might think that the recession would compel people to file their tax returns earlier. Who couldn’t use the extra cash? But it turns out that Americans have never filed later.

That’s according to a man who knows something about taxes: Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit (INTU), which makes the popular TurboTax software. “Technology makes it easier to wait later,” Smith said in a recent interview.

About 35 million tax returns are done with software or online, and about 22 million of those are done through TurboTax. People have waited longer to file each year for the last decade, says Smith. There’s usually a small peak in late January when workers get their W-2s, then a lull in February and March. On April 14, the number of people filing through TurboTax shoots up and stays there until the deadline passes a day later.

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As recently as late 2008, Pandora Networks’ Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad still had big doubts about the prospects for smartphone maker Palm (PALM). In November, Conrad was among a coterie of software developers invited to Palm headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., to take an early, up-close look at an operating system for use in the company’s phones. “I was totally skeptical when I walked in,” says Conrad, who met Palm execs along with representatives of MySpace, Intuit (INTU), movie site Fandango, and Epocrates, a maker of mobile software for physicians.

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Moves by major tech companies to open up to outside developers have been a boon for small start-ups. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo (YHOO), Apple (AAPL) and Intuit (INTU), to name a few, all allow developers to build software that hooks into their services.

But the cascade of companies opening up has created a new question for cash-conscious start-ups: which ones do you build for and which ones do you build for first?

“A lot of start-ups are wrestling with prioritizing their relatively scarce resources,” said Jim Hornthal, a partner at CMEA Capital and chairman of Triporati, a travel destination discovery service.

In the “not-too-distant past” companies could justify tackling most available platforms, said Hornthal, who founded online travel company Preview Travel, which Travelocity bought in 2000. “More likely today, the answer is something less than that,” he said. The decision often boils down to which ones a company “can’t afford not to support.”

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Expressing caution on the software sector heading into second-quarter earnings report, Goldman Sachs software analysts Sarah Friar, Sasa Zorovic, Derek Bingham and Frederick Grieb this morning chopped estimates on a host of software companies. They also cut their ratings on both Intuit (INTU) and Digital River (DRIV) to Sell from Neutral.

“A difficult U.S. macro environment and its slow spillover internationally create problems for the group,” the Goldman analysts wrote in an extensive software industry research note this morning. “These are seen in longer sales cycles, price discounting, and the need for multiple signatures for deal closings, and hence sales slippages. All this is somewhat offset by currency benefits, ongoing strength in emerging markets and trough valuations.” They also note that short interest in the group is at a three-year high and could provide some support for the shares.

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